


a pebble in the water

by Cloudandus



Category: Green Lantern (Comics), Green Lantern - All Media Types, Green Lantern Corps (Comics), Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps (Comics)
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, GuyKyle Week 2020, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, I will carry this shipweek myself if I have to, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, No beta we die like nme, Threats of Violence, all of this is kyle thinking about Guy's childhood, because I fixed it, if you see anything in this story that has you wondering, still the right day barely, the answer is now yes, you’re welcome, ‘is this canon?’
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24139696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudandus/pseuds/Cloudandus
Summary: Guy’s always had more scars than Kyle. Most of them are from his father.
Relationships: Guy Gardner/Kyle Rayner
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	a pebble in the water

**Author's Note:**

> For Guy/Kyle Week 2020 Day 2 - Scars/Time Travel
> 
> Somehow this became an 2500 plus word long ode to Guy Gardner, Adult Survivor of Child Abuse, as told by his boyfriend Kyle Rayner through an internal monologue and some poorly delineated flashbacks. I didn’t even manage to touch on anything that happened after they became GLs, despite specifically researching all Guy’s GL injuries (mostly a lot of head trauma).
> 
> I just want to make sure everyone knows that this entire fic takes place in Kyle’s mind during a boring meeting. He’s supposed to be paying attention, but he’s quite obviously staring at Guy (who’s sitting next to him) and daydreaming. John and Salaak have shared multiple commiserating looks.
> 
> Title is from “Face Down” by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.  
> "A pebble in the water makes a ripple effect  
> Every action in this world will bear a consequence."

Guy’s always had more scars than Kyle.

Kyle had collected his fair share before becoming a Green Lantern. His mother worked long hours putting food on the table and textbooks in Kyle’s backpack, and while Kyle diligently attended school and the few extracurricular art classes his Ma could get him into, he was still left to his own devices for long stretches of time. He spent that time doing things his Ma wouldn’t have approved of, usually dangerous and stupid things that ended in avoidable injuries.

He had a cut on his left forearm, where he tripped in an alley and caught himself on a broken window pane. There was a gouge on his knee that he had gotten trying to climb an abandoned building to get a closer look at the graffiti on the side. No one he’d dated had ever been able to guess that he’d gotten the line of parallel slashes on his stomach while climbing a barbed wire fence on a dare.

But none of his childhood misadventures compared to Guy’s collection of scars. While Kyle had gotten hurt when his mother wasn’t around to watch him, it had been the opposite for Guy.

When Kyle had first met Guy, Parallax had already taken Guy’s Green Lantern Ring. And Sinestro’s old ring, which he had stolen. To the surprise of absolutely no one who knew him, Guy then injected himself with the DNA of a lost race of alien shapeshifters. This not only gave him the ability to turn his fists into guns and then punch people with his gun fists, but also gave him a healing factor that erased all the scars from his body.

Guy embraced shirtlessness so confidently that Kyle never suspected it was a new thing for him. Thanks to his new Vuldarian DNA, Guy’s skin was marked only with the colorful designs of his Warrior identity. Kyle knew this for a fact; Guy had commissioned him to design his action figure, and Kyle had to study every inch of the man’s body to get the designs correct.

Thinking about it still makes him laugh. He had such a crush on Guy back then, and the modeling session left him flustered in the way not even nude studies in a room with twenty other people managed. Of course, the models at art classes didn’t tease the way Guy did. In retrospect, Kyle’s glad he didn’t ask Guy out. He was so young, and lost, and still reeling from Alex’s death. Guy would have let him down easy, and Kyle would have had to become an asteroid-dwelling recluse in the hopes he would never have to make eye contact with anyone ever again. 

He liked what they had now better. It took them some time to find each other, but being partners with Guy -- being together -- Kyle wouldn’t trade it for the galaxy. Guy was his rock, and he had never stopped supporting him even through all the trauma of their lives as Green Lanterns. Even when Kyle’s PTSD got bad and he closed off and lashed out at everyone around him, Guy refused to leave his side. He was always willing to listen, through the nightmares and the tears, even while swearing that emotions gave him hives.

Kyle thinks he might be the only one who knows the real extent of the scars Guy got from his father. Guy didn’t like sharing his medical history around, even as he never shied away from being a survivor of child abuse. He admitted it was a form of catharsis; when he was a child he tried so many times to get someone to believe him, took so many brutal punishments in the hope of escaping from his own personal hell on Earth. It never worked.

Maybe if Guy’s mother had spoken up it would have been different. Probably not, because Baltimore’s Boys in Blue had known that one of their own was beating his wife well before Guy had even been born, and they never did anything to stop him. Still, Kyle couldn’t help but resent Guy’s mother for all the times she sided with his father, calling him a liar on record and then telling him he needed to stop provoking his father once the family was hidden from prying eyes and Guy had paid for his bravery in blood.

Kyle has no right to judge. He doesn’t know what it was like to be married to your abuser and watch him do the same to your child. But Guy was a child. He needed somebody to come and take him away from his abuser. And nobody came.

Guy’s father told people that Guy hurt himself on purpose, got into fights with neighborhood kids, and then lied because he wanted attention. Because he was a sociopath. Because he was an ungrateful little shit who couldn’t take his lashes so he went crying to his teachers. 

Guy’s old man was a Police Officer. People believed him. His coworkers protected him. Noise complaints were quietly swept under the rug. Social workers were ‘convinced’ that everything was fine. CPS investigations were blatantly obstructed. A court mandated psychologist spent weeks gas lighting Guy until he ‘admitted’ that he was making it all up because of Freudian Psychoanalysis. 

God, sometimes Kyle wished Guy had been telling the truth when he said he didn’t do therapy because it was a quack profession and real men didn’t talk about their feelings. Sure, it was total toxic masculinity bullshit, but anything would be better than an abused child having been further abused by someone whose entire job was to help him. The experience ruined the concept of psychotherapy for Guy, and he categorically rejected help from Black Canary and Mogo, who were often called on to counsel their superhero coworkers.

Guy had a point that it was a huge conflict of interest to be both someone’s coworker and their therapist, but most people didn’t mind. Kyle thought Guy would have been one of them if not for his past experiences. It wasn’t that Kyle wanted Guy to be anything other than his authentic self (not that that was a problem for Guy Gardner), but getting therapy improved Kyle’s life so much. Guy had encouraged him to do it, even as the thought of potential abuses made him clench his fists and grit his teeth. He understood that the damage had been done, and Guy was never going to be able to heal in the very situation where he had been hurt so severely. He just wished Guy could be happier.

Knowing what happened to Guy, Kyle couldn’t help but be proud of his own mother. When he was little, he used to resent her for not buying him things that the other kids in his school all had, things he was too young to understand they couldn’t afford. He had fantasized that his father was out there somewhere, rich, and if Kyle could only find him he could live in a huge house where he had his own bedroom, have all the art supplies he wanted and all the video games the neighbor kids had. Kyle definitely wasn’t old enough back then to learn that his father had pushed his mother down the stairs while she was six months pregnant with him. In retrospect, his Ma choosing to leave her husband, to raise her child alone in a country where she wasn’t a legal citizen and had no money and no safety net, was braver than anything Kyle’s done in his life. He would never stop being grateful for it.

If she hadn’t left him, Kyle might have grown up with scars like Guy. Pockmarks and stripes from his shoulders to the backs of his thighs from nearly two decades of beatings. When Guy was young, his father mostly used his own belt. The buckle would break the skin and leave scars that stretched and warped as he grew. Before becoming Warrior, some had grown to the size of Guy’s palm. It was nearly impossible to tell what had caused them.

When Guy was in middle school, his father was injured in the line of duty and started living off his pension. All of the sudden he was at home 24/7, and impossible to avoid. He started beating Guy with his own metal cane. Guy was a man now, his father claimed, and only kids get the belt. The cane hurt much worse, according to Guy. It usually broke the skin, and sometimes fractured his ribs. Guy would have to wait weeks for it to heal on its own, hurting everytime he breathed. There was no treatment, unless he was willing to steal his father’s pain medication. He thought a lot about his father’s pain medication, mostly about how many he would have to slip into his father’s evening drink to make it all stop. He never did end up stealing any, because the pain in his ribs was nothing compared to the pain he’d be in if he was caught. Guy could handle pain; his father had made sure of that.

When Guy was four year old, his father taught him to ‘be a man’ by feeding him lit cigarettes and beating him if he cried. Once he’d learned to swallow them stoically without fidgeting or crying, his father invited some of his cop buddies over to demonstrate Guy’s ‘manhood’. They made him drink beer until he vomited ashes. When he was older, his father started putting his cigarettes out on Guy’s arms as punishment for minor infractions, or sometimes just to remind him of his place. He ended up with circular scars up and down both arms. The bar has a strict non-smoking policy.

Once he’d realized that no one was going to help him escape, Guy started running away on his own. He’d spend as long as he could on the streets during the summer months when school was out. He tried to stay in school and get good grades, because it was the only thing he was going to have when he left home and also because anything less than a passing grade was severely punished, but it was hard. He was injured all the time, and hungry, and usually had a lot bigger things to worry about than turning in his homework on time.

Still, school was time spent away from his father and a reliable meal. During summer, Guy would take food wherever he could find it and sleep as far away from other homeless people as he could. Not only were they a potential threat, but the police were very present in the shelters and less official homeless gathering places. The police were what Guy was worried about; the cops always got him before hunger or exposure did. And when they did, they put him in cuffs and brought him back to his father.

Standard issue police handcuffs were not intended as a long term restraint, especially against someone who’s struggling. Or being beaten with their father’s cane. Guy had marks on both wrists where he tore himself bloody, and from where his father left him cuffed to the radiator in the bathroom for days at a time as punishment for running away.

The marks were gone, just like every other physical mark Guy’s father left on him. But Kyle knew better than anyone that it’s the emotional scar tissue that ached the most.

When Guy was six years old, on Christmas morning, he asked his father why Santa didn’t come to their house like he did on TV. His father put a bullet into the TV and then pistol whipped his son with his still-loaded service revolver. 

“Only babies and queers believe in Santa,” Guy’s father had explained to him as he cowered on the floor amid the broken glass, “And no son of mine is gonna grow up to be a queer. Do you know why?”

Guy remembered every word exactly as his father had said it, and Kyle had listened in dead silence, wishing that he could hold Guy’s hand but understanding that it wouldn’t be a comfort right now.

Guy’s face was totally blank as he repeated his father’s words with all the same vitriol and hate in his voice. “Police officers protect and serve. That means we protect little kiddies from faggots by serving God’s justice to them. If we see a cock sucker, we kill them.” 

Guy’s voice went back to normal, no longer quoting his father. “So dad walked over to the fireplace. We had a fire going, cause it was Christmas, and the old man always liked to roast chestnuts on Christmas. Dad grabbed the fire poker from Mace. He and mom were just waiting for the storm to pass, you know. And Mace was fucking with the fire. So when dad grabbed it and showed it to me the end was red hot.”

It was the little details that always struck Kyle. The image of Guy’s mother and brother just waiting while Guy cowered and bled on the floor. He couldn’t imagine how all this violence, the sheer devastation that stuck with Guy for the rest of his life when so many worse injuries were easily brushed aside, was delivered so casually. How could two people, who should have loved and protected Guy, just sit and wait for his abuse to be over like they were waiting for the microwave to finish heating up leftovers?

“He said: When faggots die, they go to hell and spend all of eternity getting raped up the ass with red hot pokers, just like this one. And I know you ain’t ever gonna grow up to be a faggot, son, cause if I see you doin’ any sissy bullshit I’m gonna give you a special preview what hell is gonna be like, and you ain’t ever gonna grow up.”

Kyle was crying silently, his hands balled into fists. “You didn’t deserve that. What your father did to you was wrong. Someone should have stopped him.”

Guy didn’t deny or confirm, just smiling at him and reaching out a hand. Kyle grabbed it immediately and held on tight.

It was hard for Guy to hold his hand in public. Guy talked a big game, and made so many sexual innuendos you’d think it was the source of his powers, but PDA scared the shit out of him. Guy’s father was dead, and Guy was lightyears away. He had superpowers. He had fought the Anti-Monitor, he had fought Doomsday, he had beaten up an evil city. He was respected by his colleagues and feared by his enemies. And sometimes he felt like he was still a little kid, and his father was going to see him acting like a ‘sissy’ and kill him with that red-hot iron poker.

Of course, Guy’s father had traumatized him about more than just same-sex intimacy. Guy had been forced to watch his father beat and rape his mother, sometimes at the same time. His father’s version of Sex Ed was having him watch the VHS tape of “Deep Throat” at the age of five. Heterosexuality was its own kind of violence, and produced its own kind of fear.

Kyle couldn’t imagine how much strength it took to survive all that. Everytime Guy kissed him where other people could see was a victory. Every day he was happy, despite his father, was another step forward.

Guy wasn’t alone anymore. His father was never going to hurt him again.

No one was ever going to hurt Guy like that again. Kyle would make sure of it.


End file.
